Tales from the jar side, Week of May 19, 2019
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of May 19, 2019. This week I taught an online Gradle class (sort of), and dealt with the aftermath of various personal issues.
First, I want to thank all those people who sent me notes about my mother's passing last week. Your kindness is appreciated. Late Saturday my sister notified me that the funeral was scheduled for Monday morning in Philadelphia where she lives, followed by a burial in York, PA where my parents spent most of the last 40 years.
After talking to my wife, we decided to go to the funeral. That meant driving down from Connecticut on Sunday, attending the ceremony Monday morning, and returning later that day. It would mean a lot of driving (it's about a 4 1/2 hour trip each way, depending on New York traffic, which is simply unavoidable), but since my Intro Gradle class was scheduled for Tuesday/Wednesday, I figured I could do it.
The service itself was fine. More people attended than I expected, given that it was a Monday morning, but I think a lot of that was for my sister, who has lived in the Philadelphia suburbs for several years. My sister spoke (highlight: "she decided to go back to school and become a nurse. Afterward she remembered that she didn't like people -- especially sick people. So she started working in an operating room, which worked out better for everybody"), and so did my niece. Everyone was very kind.
As a practical note, I stopped on the way down at a rest stop on the NJ Turnpike that had a Tesla Supercharger. We plugged in the car, went in and had lunch, and half an hour later the car was basically fully charged at the cost of about $4. We therefore planned to do the same thing again on the way home.
That's where I was on Monday at about noon when I checked my email and discovered I'd made a horrible mistake. My Gradle class wasn't Tuesday/Wednesday at all. It was Monday/Tuesday, and the organizer wanted to know where the heck I was.
I couldn't believe it. Gradle runs their introductory course every other month, and I've been teaching it for a few years now. It's always on Tuesday/Wednesday, from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm Pacific time, which is 11:30 am to 3:30 pm for me in Connecticut. Why did it start on Monday this time?
It slowly came back to me that it was all my fault. Back in February, when we were confirming dates, I had a conflict with the normal May days. I asked for the class to be moved. Then, for some bizarre reason, I put the wrong dates on my calendar, or didn't update the ones that were already there. Gradle never sent me a meeting confirmation (a problem with the process we need to rectify, but still), but we did reconfirm the dates in April. My expected conflict had gone away, so I assumed everything was fine and never checked to see that the dates were now off-by-one.
(Old I.T. joke: there are two really hard problems in computer science: (1) naming things, (2) cache invalidation, and (3) off-by-one errors.)
You may recall that in last week's newsletter I actually linked to the class listing online. I looked right at it and never realized that the first date was a Monday rather than a Tuesday. It never even occurred to me to check.
My mother passed away on Saturday morning. The funeral was Monday morning, so I had to travel on Sunday. If I'd known my class was Monday, could I have reached anyone at Gradle over the weekend? Hard to say. It's possible. Like a lot of software companies, especially ones like Gradle that have a workforce distributed all over the world, there was probably somebody available somewhere. I didn't even try, though, because I thought I'd be back in time.
Before I go on, let me tell you what happened after I found out about the problem. I explained via email that I'd blundered and wouldn't be back in time for class. They were disappointed, but once they found out the reason, they understood. I think it helped that no money was involved -- the Introduction to Gradle class offered by Gradle is free to everyone, so the only "cost" was the time attending online. It's not like I left a room full of students hanging, with their company furious about all the money spent and demanding a refund.
I did go to the class on Tuesday and after explaining what happened I covered all the important parts of both days of material. So the damage was minimized, though there still was damage. I didn't charge Gradle for the class either, which seemed only fair, and it was clear that given the reasons this was very unlikely to happen again.
Speaking of those reasons, the real question, at least for me, was: if I'd known the funeral conflicted with the class, would I have gone anyway?
As you may have gathered, relations in my family (specifically with my mother) have grown rather strained over the past few years, and got much worse after my father died. As the saying goes, "crazy people make normal people act crazy", and I can vouch for that. People in the U.S. are learning what it's like to have to deal with someone with an untreated mental illness on a daily basis, but in my family we've known for years. To put it mildly, it's hard.
Combine that with the fact that I took such pride in my "never missed a training day" streak -- which I even discussed in the last newsletter when I talked about doing two classes even when I was fighting a nasty cold, and you can imagine how I felt sitting in that rest stop in New Jersey.
(The cold is better now, thanks, though that cough is still hanging around. Grr.)
That streak was a major point of pride. I always referred to it as my Cal Ripken streak, after the Orioles baseball player who played 2632 consecutive games in the majors before missing one. Once when interviewing with a training company I was asked what a good reason would be for missing a training day, and I was very pleased to say, "I don't know; I've never missed one." I was hoping to have a big celebration on May 31, 2020, when my streak hit 20 years.
And now it's gone. I missed 19 years by about two weeks, and now it's over, partly for an arguably good reason (my mother's funeral) and partly for a really bad one (I wrote down the wrong dates, which were changed at my request).
I remember, though, that when Ripken's streak was nearing its end, it became rather controversial. He was getting older, and his performance had dropped considerably, and many commentators whispered (you couldn't really challenge a streak like that out loud) that the team might be better off if they rested him occasionally. You could argue that the streak had grown more important than the team, or even the game itself. In the end, Ripken himself decided one day that he'd had enough, and deliberately didn't play in the last Orioles home game of the 1998 season, bringing the streak to an end.
I'm pretty sure that if I'd known I had the class on Monday, I would have skipped the funeral. I also know that would have been a mistake. Even though it was a simple, quiet ceremony and my sister would have understood if I hadn't been there, in the end it's better that I attended. If I'd made the decision myself I would have at least tried to notify the people at Gradle, but if I'd made the decision myself I probably wouldn't have gone at all, so maybe it's for the best. Maybe the only way I would have attended is to make a blunder like that, and there's some poetic justice in having to sacrifice something in the process. I loved that streak, but maybe, just maybe, the funeral was more important.
Or maybe I'm just rationalizing it all now. Time will tell, I guess. Regardless of my intentions, that's what happened, and now it's time to get back to what constitutes my version of normal.
Incidentally, my wife is older than I am, and her parents waited longer to have her than my parents waited to have me, so her parents were more than a decade older than mine. The result is that my mother was the last of the four to leave us. When my wife's parents passed away, she said two unexpected emotions came up:
1. You are now truly alone (present company excepted), and
2. You're next
I get that now, or rather I'll be unwinding those feelings over the next few weeks or months. But don't worry, I don't plan on going anywhere any time soon. :)
Last week:
Introduction to Gradle, online for Gradle, Inc (more or less)
Personal issues described above
Next week:
Advanced Gradle class at a private client in Portland, OR
Get back to making progress on the various book projects